We are passionate about promoting mental well-being and helping people who struggle with daily stress. We, ourselves struggled with it because of our ambitious goals at college, and thought that we lost control about most aspects of our lives at some point. Luckily, friends and family were very helpful. We decided to create a non-emergency peer-support web chat platform where everyone can talk about their feelings and listen to what others have to say.
By using this web platform, in three steps, you are connected with others and have access to a support network:
1) Create an account with an email and password.
2) Connect randomly and anonymously with other users. Users only see the hashed ids for usernames. No identity is revealed. All communication is encrypted.
3) Create chat rooms and bookmark them to talk to same people if users agree to reveal their usernames.
Most people tend to avoid talking to others about their struggles with life because they want to avoid judgment. That’s why privacy is our major commitment and the platform offers fully anonymous chatting. We don’t ask for phone numbers and we even hash the usernames.
We are aware that delivering this software could be as important as life and death. We want to make sure that we have the backend server up and running by the end of the year so that people can start using the platform. Soft deadline which is for the front-end of the platform is December 15th and hard deadline which is for the back-end of the platform is December 31st, 2019.
You might ask who we are. We are two brothers who are passionate about helping people by using technology. We believe technology enables human kind achieve great things and develop awesome tools to improve life quality. This was exactly what we had in mind when we started this platform.
We both study computer science student. We spend our days taking classes at school and our nights coding new features for this platform.
We are constantly coding for core features right now and you can check out the current development through this link: Help Up Platform
We need funds to rent a web server and database. Right now, we can’t send any messages to other users. If you go to the Help Up Platform, you will see that chat rooms always appear as disconnected. With your help, we can implement the back-end to emit messages via our rented web server.
We promise to officially recognize your support by publishing it on the website if it is greater than 100$. Since every aspect of this project is based on volunteering, we need your help. We don’t have anything tangible to offer besides officially recognizing your help as a sponsor on the platform.
Project itself has challenging features such as end-to-end encryption. Each feature that we would like to add can take long time if we are busy. Since this project is based on volunteering and good intentions,we are trying to devote as much time as we can, but when we are traveling or taking exams during finals week, we wont be able to work on this. Other biggest problem is funds. Not only we need help covering the initial cost of renting a web host and server, but also we will need funds for later cost of increasing user base. This is because based on the number of users, we will have to pay for data storage and database in a pay-as-you-go manner. This means there is a risk that once the platform is up and running, there still might be a moment where the number of users will cause congestion on the backend, and we will need more funds to scale the database. That’s why we appreciate any help that you could offer.